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Publication Date: 2026-01-22 21:01:00
Nutanix Inc. sits at the crossroads of two powerful but conflicting trends: the push to the cloud and the pull back on-prem. The company that once sold boxes in racks now sells freedom — the promise to run workloads anywhere. Whether that promise pays off depends on which way enterprise AI turns next.
At the Nutanix .NEXT conference last June, the company outlined a strategic shift. Long known for hyperconverged infrastructure hardware-plus-software, Nutanix told the crowd: We’re moving up the stack. We will be the multicloud control plane, the AI-ready platform across data centers, cloud and edge. It unveiled tighter partnerships with major players — public cloud providers, hardware OEMs and AI accelerators — and talked about “workload flexibility” becoming a demand, not a nice-to-have.
Fresh announcements followed: a hypervisor-independent operating environment, extended support for cloud clusters and a wider ecosystem of partner integrations. The announcements addressed many of the questions enterprises are grappling with around where AI and compute should live.
“We want to be the platform for companies to run applications and manage their data. The specific set of applications are going to evolve,” Nutanix Chief Executive Officer Rajiv Ramaswami told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “It used to be VM applications; now it’s cloud-native applications. Tomorrow, it’s going to be AI and AI-influencing applications.”
